I absolutely love taking photos of my everyday moments and sharing my fun excursions on Instagram! What I don’t love so much, is hauling my professional camera and gear bag along for the ride. My professional camera is heavy, expensive and the camera bag I use doesn’t go with my outfit 99% of the time. In fact, I rarely grab my camera bag when I’m not shooting portraits or a wedding!
So how does a professional photographer, whose favorite pass time is reliving her favorite memories through printed photos, capture beautiful images of her own life?! I use my iPhone the majority of the time! It’s the one camera that I have with me at all times. So, I’ve made it a point to master Phone Photography to create beautiful images for both my Instagram feed and my personal family prints.
So today, I’m sharing a few tips to create beautiful images with your phone’s camera.
6 Tips to Take Better Phone Images
- FIND NATURAL LIGHT: I have to say that utilizing natural light for your photos is the #1 tip to taking better phone photos. In fact, if you only take one thing away from this blog post, it should be to turn off your overhead lamps and find the best natural light before snapping your photo. If you are inside, then finding the light will mean getting closest to the window with the most natural light illuminating the room. Depending on the time of day you shoot, you may find that the window light isn’t giving you as much brightness as you like. And, that’s when I suggest you move things outside! I get the best light on my balcony. I know my neighbors think I’m crazy, when they see me standing out there on a chair photographing my dinner or florals I took home from a photo shoot, but it makes for great photos! If you are shooting outside, avoid shooting where it is very sunny and move into a nicely shaded area. The goal is to avoid dark shadows, casted on objects or people in your photos, from the harsh daylight sun. The best time to begin shooting outdoors is two hours after sunrise or two hours before sunset. When shooting with your cellphone, you can slide your finger up or down on the screen to brighten your image before taking the photo.
- CLEAN YOUR LENS: Our phones spend a lot of time in our pockets, handbags or in the hands of babes if you’re a mom like me. The dirt, dust and greasy prints can blur the images we take with our phones. I suggest wiping your lens clean for crisper, shaper photos in camera.
- EXPLORE COMPOSITION: Great composition can bump your phone photography up a few notches and it’s quite simple! I use the “Rule of Thirds” to help me compose my photos to be pleasing to the eye. It’s basically a grid of two horizontal lines and two vertical lines. And to balance your photo, you put your subject in the center or along the lines, creating some negative space in your image. To try using the grid to improve your images on the iPhone, follow these steps. On you phone go to Settings > Photos & Camera and then scroll down to Camera and turn the grid on.
- SET YOUR FOCUS: To make sure your photo is clear and sharp, tap the screen on where you would like to focus the camera on your subject. If you’re using the iPhone, a yellow box will appear to show you where the focus is and that might change your exposure (AKA brightness). So, remember to slide your finger up or down to adjust the brightness of your photo if it changes after you’ve tapped the screen to focus your image.
- EDIT LIKE A PRO: The possibilities are endless with photo editing. It’s one of those things that really distinguishes your style and sets the mood/feel of your images. I use editing to enhance the good in the photo that I’ve taken. It won’t necessarily turn a bad photo into an art piece, but if you’ve got a good foundation going, the editing process will give a nice finish to your image. Editing is one of those things that takes trial and error to find your happy place. So, I’m going to share with you a great starting point for editing your phone photos. Once you’ve opened your editing app or pulled your image into Instagram, try playing with the exposure/brightness, warmth, saturation, highlights, shadow and sharpen sliders. Go ahead and pull the slider all the way to the left, then all the way to the right, so that you can really see what effects it takes on the photo. I usually only adjust the slider a few points away from the center point. Here are some of my favorite editing apps: Snapseed, Pic Tap Go, Camera+, VSCO and Instagram.
- PRINT YOUR PHOTOS: So after mastering those phone photography skills, you’ll want to get your images off your phone and printed as a lasting keepsake. And there are a host of different companies that make it super easy and simple to do. Here are a few that I found: Artifact Uprising, Chatbooks, and Blurb.
That’s it, simple right?! Go ahead and try out these tips for yourself and tag me on Instagram (@annblakephoto)! I want to see your new skills in action. 🙂
Looking for more tips? Visit my blog next week; when I take you step by step through my editing process on my iPhone!
